Daekwon Jacorbian Hines, a 17-year-old Black male from Thomson, Georgia, disappeared in the middle of May 2018, leaving behind the kind of silence that frightened the people who knew him best. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, his family reported him missing on Friday, May 11, and three days later, on Monday, May 14, his body was found in a wooded area off Dell Drive in Thomson at about 2:30 that afternoon. Two days after that discovery, the GBI publicly identified him and said an autopsy at the crime lab in Decatur showed he had died from a gunshot wound and that his death had been ruled a homicide. His obituary places him at 17 and shows how wide the circle of grief around him really was, naming a large family and the home on Cardinal Street where he had been living in Thomson.
The picture that emerges from the available reporting is of a teenager whose death landed hard on both his family and his town. Later memorial reporting said his mother kept sending him the good morning texts they had shared before his death, a small habit that turned into an aching ritual after he was gone. His funeral notice called him Dae-Dae, and even in the formal language of an obituary there is a sense of a life interrupted before it had a chance to settle into itself. The official record is spare, but that sparseness only sharpens the tragedy: a missing teen, a patch of woods off Dell Drive, an autopsy confirming a gunshot wound, and a homicide investigation taken up by the GBI, the Thomson Police Department, and the McDuffie County Sheriff’s Office.
As for suspects, arrests, and charges, the publicly available sources I found do not name any suspect in Daekwon Hines’s killing, and I did not find an official GBI arrest update tied to his case. The GBI’s identification release asked for tips from the public, which suggests investigators were still seeking information at that stage, and the other accessible online sources located during this search did not show a later public announcement of an arrest, prosecution, trial, or conviction in his death. Based on the online record I reviewed, the case appears to have remained without a publicly identified suspect or publicly announced arrest in the sources available here.
